For Some City Fitness Buffs, Intense Heat Is No Deterrent

When you’re dedicated to your fitness routine, weeks of 90-something weather is no obstacle.

SAM DOLNICK

To escape the relentless heat, some seek out shade, basements or air-conditioned cocoons. Others head for places even hotter than the awful outdoors.

On Wednesday, inside a small, mirrored yoga studio in Midtown that was as sticky as a jungle, 21 people twisted their otter-slick limbs into knots as sweat soaked through their towels and dripped to the floor.

Outside, it was 87 degrees. Inside, it was 106 — and as sour-smelling as a gym locker.

Five minutes in the room made one long for the 34th Street station’s subway platform. That was exactly the point.

“It’s not going to feel hot outside when I go out,” said Celester Rich, whose bald head was glistening after class. “I used to complain, ‘Oh, it’s so hot out.’ But now I don’t care anymore. It doesn’t even bother me.”

“If you can handle this,” he added, “you can handle everything.”

The city’s Bikram Yoga studios, where participants stretch and sweat prodigiously inside heated rooms, belong to the sparse ranks of New York places that are warmer than the sidewalk outside — pizza ovens, saunas, perhaps a stuck elevator.

Yet Jen Lobo, an owner of Bikram Yoga NYC, which has four studios across the city, says that the July heat, on pace to break the record for the hottest month in city history, has hardly affected attendance.

Indeed, the hot weather seems to draw out a certain type of person undaunted by the elements. While many people cower beneath fans until nightfall, some hearty souls head to hot yoga rooms, running tracks or bike paths to — gasp! — exercise, no matter the hour or the temperature.

Just before noon on Wednesday, with the mercury well on its way to the high of 89 degrees, a shirtless 68-year-old man named Nick Nave, his skin tanned to a coconut brown, ran a loop through Central Park, part of an eight-mile daily regimen. He shrugged off the sun, the meteorologists and the record books.

“I adore running in the heat,” he said, taking a brief pause from his jog. He wore eccentric blue sunglasses and carried a yellow T-shirt in one hand and a buzzing BlackBerry in the other. “I thrive on it.”

He said he ran much faster in the heat than in cool weather, and he credited his taste for the sun to his childhood in Israel.

He was far from the only runner on Wednesday to thumb his nose at the thermometer.

Tourists, mothers, marathoners and retirees circled Central Park, some with concessions made for the heat, others stubbornly without.

Diana Cano, 20, a student visiting from Mexico City, said she had discovered a little quirk about running in the sun. “You sweat more and you feel like you’re doing more even though you’re doing exactly the same,” she said. Take a jog for, say, 15 minutes, she said, and “it’s like an hour.”

But for others, that is exactly the problem. Many runners preparing for the New York marathon, to be held on Nov. 7, have had to carry on their training programs through the hottest days of July.

For them, this summer has been a game of balancing miles and degrees: on one scale there was 26.2, and on the other there were 103, 100 and a bushel of 90s. Usually, the 26.2 wins out.

“I’ve got an obsession with my training, so even on days when I probably shouldn’t have gone out, I’ve forced myself to,” said Aled Jones, an information technology specialist preparing for his first marathon.

He said he had run on the hottest days of the summer when “the air burns; you’ve got hot air burning the back of your throat.” His water bottles, ice when he sets out, melt within 20 minutes — along with the rest of him.

“Everything I’m wearing, from my socks to my underwear, is just soaked by the time I’m finished,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s not pleasant. Then you have to deal with the chafing, which can be kind of embarrassing.”

Perhaps he should head to Bikram Yoga NYC in Midtown, where no one seemed embarrassed about anything — not their shirts, which looked as if they had been doused by a fire hose; or their aromas, which could stop Army tanks cold.

Soon after the class on Wednesday finished at 1 p.m., Mr. Rich, his bald head now dry, stepped onto Eighth Avenue, where people shielded their eyes from the sun and bodega flowers wilted in plastic wrap.